


Solitary Work

by toushindai (WallofIllusion)



Series: Business & Pleasure [2]
Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Bratting, Choking, Established Relationship, F/M, Non-Sexual Kink, Pre-Canon, Whipping, kink as therapy, this is just a W. no plot but technically no porn either
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-12 12:45:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19132297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WallofIllusion/pseuds/toushindai
Summary: She shouldn't let him bait her like this, least of all while she's working, but here they are.





	Solitary Work

**Author's Note:**

> yep! zagaera again.

“Hey, Meg.”

She turns sharply to see the prince standing in the doorway to her hall, a cocky little smirk on his face. She narrows her eyes. “What are you doing all the way out here?”

“I was working, if you can believe it.”

“I can’t.” She has heard Lord Hades complain of Zagreus’s truancy and knows by her own witness that he is at home more often than not, either training with Achilles or skulking around somewhere doing nothing in particular. He has free rein of Tartarus, of course, and if he’d show any kind of initiative he’d be allowed beyond its limits as well, but he never does his job. And what work he has doesn’t bring him to her doorstep.

His eyes go dark for a moment, oddly, but then his smirk widens into a toothy grin. “Well, I did get bored,” he admits, “a few hours ago. Figured I might as well come say hi to you while I was in the area.”

That does sound more like him. Megaera is unimpressed, and uninterested in the strangeness in his bearing. She turns away, her mind already on her next victims and what they deserve. “I’m working. I don’t have time to deal with you right now. Go home.”

“No.”

Slowly, she turns back to him. “That wasn’t a _suggestion_ , Zagreus.”

He only shrugs, and doesn’t back down. His eyes are still dark, and there is an ember in them of something stubborn and provoking. His most infuriating traits. And he knows it.

Without warning, Megaera rushes forward in a single wingbeat and catches his throat in one hand. The force of her rush drives his head back against the stone with a  _crack_. His eyes widen and his pulse races under her grasp, but for some _mysterious_ reason, he doesn’t lift his hands to fight back. Bastard.

“What is it?” she demands.

His chest rises and falls with rushed breaths, and yes, she sees the splintered want in his eyes clearly now. He can’t hide it when it’s this close to the surface, not even with the cavalier obstinacy he pretends. “What’s what?”

“What’s wrong?” She tightens her grip, feels his throat work to swallow past her palm. Any more than this, and he won’t be able to breathe. “What the hell is bothering you so much that you decided you needed to harass me at work?”

Another labored gulp. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He is exasperating, always, _always_. She is angry enough to hurt him, but angry, too, at the raw aching wound he’s brought to her and demanded that she treat. Without even telling her what it _is_. He’s lucky that she can feel it in the air—or does it not matter to him either way? Maybe he was planning to annoy her into assisting him.

She squeezes his throat tighter: too tight, now. He tries to gasp but the air can’t make it down his throat, and she watches his eyes bulge. Still his arms hang docile at his sides, hands opening and closing as if to ground him. She lifts him, shoves his head back to meet the stone once more. A soundless grunt wracks his body and his eyes go hazy for a moment. Then his feet kick, feebly, and desperate red begins to creep into his face. His eyelids flutter with the effort of holding her gaze. She lets no mercy show on her face until his eyes roll back; then, with a disdainful sniff, she releases him all at once. He crumples to the ground, turning the fall into something half-graceful at the last second.  

She stares down at him. “Is that what you wanted?”

He wheezes for air and doesn’t deny it.

“Go home,” she orders. “You’re wasting my time.”

He looks upward from his crouch. The flush is beginning to retreat from his sweat-beaded face, but that stubborn ember is still in his eyes. “No,” he says in a voice that croaks with effort.

She stares at him in patent exasperation. “Zag, I’m _working_.”

“This is well enough your job, isn’t it?”

“Go to hell.” What does he even mean—dealing with him, or punishing those who step out of line in Tartarus? And does he stop to wonder whether she _wants_ to conflate the two? He should know by now that she will give this to him if he asks, because the interplay of power and pain and desire captivates both of them. He doesn’t have to insult her, to invade her territory, to _interrupt her work_ in order to earn it.

And yet here he damn well is, isn’t he.

Megaera crouches in front of him to even out their lines of sight. Zagreus freezes. He’s waiting for what she will do, but only nominally; she’s sure that he’ll slip right back into provoking her if he thinks it’ll get him what he wants. Since he’s too much of a brat to ask politely or at an appropriate time.

“You really want a whipping, don’t you?” she asks, her voice dangerously quiet. It’s all painfully clear on his face, need and a thin instinctive thread of something weak both held in check by hopeless obstinacy. She wants to tear into it, make him see sense. She wants to rip him to shreds and leave him exposed to the pain he is trying so hard to hide from himself. She shouldn’t let him bait her like this, but here they are. Letting a practiced ice creep into her gaze, she orders, “Tell me what’s wrong.”

A minute shake of his head doesn’t quite conceal his wince. “You won’t want to hear it.”

“Oh, but I do.” She puts her hand on his throat again, almost gentle, and presses his chin upwards with a thumb. Zagreus watches her like some poor small creature entranced by a snake. ”Tell me what you’re so desperate to be punished for, Zag, or I’m sending you home the hard way.”

He shakes his head again, harder this time, and reckless despair bleeds into his eyes. “Isn’t all of this enough? Ditching work, interrupting you?” So it _was_ planned, was it? Zagreus responds to her cocked eyebrow by averting his gaze. “It’s… hard to explain, Meg, and I feel like we’re going to fight if I try.”

So then she knows what it must be about, and why it flared up while he was working. Because there’s one thing they argue about, over and over. Zagreus meets her eyes—hesitant, almost fearful—and reads her understanding on her. He winces again. She is tempted to reprise the argument anyway; it has to get through to him eventually, doesn’t it?

But before she can speak, he pulls the corners of his lips up in a pitiful attempt to smile. “Everyone has the answers but me, it seems. I know _you_ do. But I’m so… tired. Of all of it. I can’t take it right now.”

There’s desperation in his eyes and a crease lodged between his brows. Something has him cracked open, pain leaking out of him like blood into water. If Megaera goes on the attack, he’ll close off, trapping all of it inside of him to rot. He’s so damned needy.

So she stands. “On your feet,” she orders. “Strip to the waist.”

His eyes widen and he looks up at her in genuine surprise. She only sneers, playing the role he’s demanded of her. “Don’t make me repeat myself, Zag.”

So he hurries to obey, standing unevenly and letting his chiton fall over his belt. He rolls his shoulders, subtly, as if warming up his muscles, and looks to her for further orders.

“I don’t have time to tie you up,” she says. She doesn’t really have _this_ time, either, but she’s caught on his need like a trap and the sooner they start, the sooner he might manage to put himself back together and stop bleeding his pain into the air around him. “Put your hands on the wall. Don’t flinch, or it’ll be worse for you.”

Obediently, he faces the wall and braces himself, his legs slightly spread in a balanced stance. Megaera wonders idly if he’s hard. Somehow, she suspects he isn’t; this is a different kind of need. More raw than greedy. She looses her whip from its holster at her hip and limbers up her wrist. 

Then, with a deceptively fluid motion, she lashes him across his exposed back. His breath stutters and his fingers contract where they’re braced against the wall, but he doesn’t flinch. He stands firm. Megaera watches an angry red welt form across his skin and then, just before he can get too comfortable, hits him again. It comes easily to her. She has been at this for centuries, and she marks him precisely where she means to, a pristine X that spans his upper back. But it won’t remain pristine for long. Soon enough, she finds her rhythm, watching his skin grow red and raw under her attentions and listening as his breaths become more ragged, more voiced. He doesn’t scream—it takes more than this to get him to that point—but he groans and growls, his hands gripping the brick wall before him desperately. When he ducks his head suddenly, his posture shrinking in on itself, Megaera grants him a moment’s pause. 

“You asked for this,” she reminds him.

She watches his rib cage expand and contact. “I did,” he confesses, hoarsely. 

“And that’s all you can take?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Her hand tightens around the grip of her lash, scornful at his impudence, but he turns his head, just slightly, to look at her. “I can take more,” he says, not pleading or bragging. Simply stating a fact. Inviting further ill treatment. He is incomprehensible, sometimes. Megaera steps forward and digs her nails into the worst of the welts, and Zagreus chokes on the unexpected pain. She pretends not to hear. She presses a little harder, breaks open the skin; blood wells up under her fingernails. She can feel his muscles working under her touch. Still he remains braced against the wall, not pulling away from her touch. He takes big gulping breaths that seem to compose him. When she digs her fingers into the open wounds and twists, he relaxes rather than tenses, accepting the pain. 

She pulls her hand back, wipes his blood on her skirt. His red stands out against the shades’ black and the grime of Tartarus that are already there. “Ready?” she asks coolly. 

He exhales slowly, then nods. “Yes.” 

So she steps back into place and, once he straightens, throws the lash again. This time, his breath catches in his throat with a choked sound as the whip tears open the skin that she’d started with her nails. With each lash, the wound grows and spreads across his back, an irregular shape with jagged edges. Still Zagreus does not protest, does not resist. The sounds he makes are both anguished and oddly patient. Megaera wonders, as she watches his body shake under her attentions, what he thinks about at times like these. The rest of her victims only care about what will stop the pain, but that obviously isn’t the case with him. Given that he seeks this, over and over. Given that he never even tells her when he’s at his limit and instead determinedly bears the abuse. He’s someone different like this; his careless sarcasm disappears, and all of his defenses, and he shows her what he can take at the core of him.

By the time his legs buckle and he half-crashes forward into the wall, his back is a lattice of open skin and rivulets of blood are seeping into the cloth bunched at his waist. Megaera puts up her whip, wrapping it loosely and securing it back into its holster. It will need to be cleaned and re-oiled soon, which is more time that she’ll have to waste on him. First, though, she steps forward and brushes her fingers against his hair lightly. It seems to put the strength back in his legs, though his breath shakes as it goes out. She continues to stroke his hair as he whimpers, closer to crying than not. He does not shy from her touch. He does not speak. She still has no idea what’s going through his head. But that frantic desperate ache he’d brought to her is gone from the air, addressed or answered or otherwise vanquished. Somehow, he’s putting himself back together.

Finally, his breaths stop quivering and become deep and bracing. After a few of those, he blinks a few times and looks at Megaera, his eyes slowly focusing. “Thank you,” he says, sounding only half-present. 

She acknowledges it with a lift of one eyebrow and a slight nod, and pulls back to give him space as he comes back to himself. Moving gingerly—which is understandable—he pushes away from the wall and moves his shoulders about experimentally. He winces when the movement provokes the open wounds and seems to notice, for the first time, the extent of the damage. His eyebrows shoot up. “Oh, that’s—” He tries to look down his back over his own shoulder, pulling at the skin with one hand and wincing again. “Oh.” 

“Too much?” Megaera asks, a challenge; a refusal of the flicker of guilt that lights in her stomach at his alarm. 

He denies it, anyway. “No, it’s—I needed that, it’s just…” He turns a quarter-circle trying to see his own back, the spitting image of a dog chasing its tail. “I can’t go back home like this.”

He doesn’t wear his chiton to cover his whole back, and even his divine body won’t repair  _this_  damage quickly. The wounds will be seen. Megaera lifts her chin. “You should have thought of that before you came to me out here,” and she should have, too, but what does he expect? It isn’t her job (her _real_  job) to pay attention to the minutiae of her victims’ circumstances. To be _kind_.

But Zagreus doesn’t seem to blame her, instead accepting the rebuke with a wry smile. “You’re right,” he says. He’s beginning to regain his usual pace, gentler and better-natured than he was when he came in. “I’m sorry, Meg, it was a bit of an emergency.”

“An emergency.”

“Yes,” he answers, and doesn’t elaborate. He stretches his shoulders and then sucks his teeth in pain. “Oh, this was a _terrible_ idea. Mngh.” 

Megaera stares. It is _astounding_  how little she understands about Zagreus. 

In the end, all she can do is take refuge in her duty. ”I need to get back to work,” she says. “You’ve wasted enough of my time. So unless you want me to hang you from the ceiling as a warning to all the rest of my victims, you’d best find somewhere else to be.”

That’s almost a grin, what he sends back to her. There is a nonsensical fondness in his eyes. “Tempting. But I think I’m going to wash up a bit, you’ve got a fountain around here somewhere, haven’t you?” He shrugs his chiton back into place, wincing a bit as the fabric brushes against his raw skin. “Gods, that hurts.”

“Zagreus—” He turns to look at her, but she doesn’t know what she’s trying to say. She doesn’t know how she’s supposed to feel about him, or how she does. She says, instead, “Don’t interrupt me here again or you’ll get worse.”

Another smile. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he says, his tone indulgent. Part of Megaera wants to snap that that wasn’t a proposition. (The other part of her wants to know what more he can take.) “I’ll see you at home, Meg.”

And with that he retreats, cursing with an odd contentment at the pain, and leaving Megaera to the solitary work she should have been doing all along.


End file.
